Coffee With Chandra

Chandra’s directions are a commentary on the state of the roads in Bangalore. “Turn left at the coffee shop,” he tells me, and then, “drive on till you come to a huge pothole. Try not to fall in as you turn right. I’ll be waiting for you.” A few minutes later, he was waving me down outside the house he has lived in for 50 years. Chandra wears orthopaedic shoes, the legacy of a motor accident a quarter century ago that rendered him virtually immobile for months. He didn’t need to come out; I am touched. As we enter the house, I remember the many interesting places I have met Bhagwath Chandrasekhar over the decades. At a tailor’s in Jayanagar, then a suburb (now definitely urb) in the late ’60s. At a showing of the movie Jungle Book in Rex Theatre. At a civic reception following his triumphant return from the England tour of 1971 (I played the trombone in the welcoming brass band from my school). At the place I shared with a friend where he had dropped in to talk about his benefit match (he sat on a bed; my friend preserved a portion of the bed sheet!). And most startling of all, in a showcase at a Francis Bacon retrospective at Tate Britain in London. This last was a photograph of Chandra bowling to England’s Roger Tolchard in a Kolkata Test. Chandra gets balletic, seemingly on the toes of his left foot as the ball is edged. Wicketkeeper Syed Kirmani’s leap to his right, again with just the toes of his foot touching the ground, is no less balletic. It is a beautifully composed shot, by Patrick Eagar, and was under the “images that inspired Bacon” section of the show. The painter who has “Baconised” Ian Botham, and possibly David Gower (there is some confusion over this) may or may not have done the same to Chandra. I asked a Bacon biographer once, but he wasn’t sure. There is restlessness in the air. Chandra is awaiting the arrival of his passport stamped with a Schengen visa, but it hasn’t come yet. He is off to Europe on a holiday, and telephone calls interrupt our conversation. No, it hasn’t come. Yes, I am expecting it any moment. There is still time, no need to panic. He seems to be trying to convince himself rather than the callers. He is really looking forward to Vienna.

Chandra’s passion for Mukesh’s music converted many of his friends. Gavaskar sometimes hummed a Mukesh tune on the field to inspire Chandra

“Can I get you a coffee?” he asks and disappears inside when I tell him in some embarrassment that it would be a lifesaver after over two hours on the road. I am left to admire some of the cricket photographs on the walls. Greeting the Queen in England, receiving the congratulations of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in New Delhi. And just where the stairs begin to turn, the picture that inspired Bacon. The coffee arrives, and I sense the Chandra smile before I see it, “It was a great effort by Kirmani,” he says, “but the catch wasn’t taken.” I narrate the Tate story, but Chandra is unimpressed. He is more excited when I tell him later how, years ago, I enjoyed a programme on TV where he sang songs from Bollywood films. His partner on that occasion too was Kirmani, and I had marvelled at the manner in which he could the hit high notes so effortlessly while seated. “That was recorded before a live audience,” he says, “We had two sessions, and it was thoroughly enjoyable.” “Do you keep in touch with your mates?” I ask. “Yes, I was at a function at the KSCA last week,” he says, “Bishan [Bedi] calls up often.” Bedi once famously said that he “saw God in Chandra”, explaining there was something pure and innocent about the man who destroyed batting line-ups, the only bowler the great Viv Richards says “gave him nightmares”. Chandra, 72, is in a good place. His son, named Nitin, like the son of his greatest hero, the singer Mukesh, is in San Jose, California, and Chandra is a grandfather twice over. His wife, Sandhya, has reconnected with a passion for playing the veena and gives public performances

“I am her chauffeur,” explains Chandra proudly, “I drive her to practice sessions, and to performances.” As if on cue, the lady herself walks in from outside. She has taken public transport today. “Hello,” she says, “Did Chandra get you coffee?” Coffee for the guest before anything else – it is traditional south Indian hospitality. “Yes, he makes a good cup,” I reply, as Chandra smiles modestly, and the conversation glides towards movie songs. “I love Malayalam songs,” says Sandhya, and we talk of an old love song where the beau asks his lover, “Can you tune a veena?” Sandhya likes that – the question is not whether the girl can cook or converse or make love, but whether she can tune a musical instrument. Presumably if she couldn’t, she’d be disqualified. Music has been Chandra’s passion too. Very specific music, very specific musician. The singer Mukesh was over 20 years older and died in 1976, just a decade after meeting Chandra. But for Chandra he continues to be a living presence. “Thanks to modern technology,” he says, “I have been able to dig out obscure songs he sang, private recitals he gave. I spend hours tracking and recording his music.” He has no favourites, he says, he loves them all. “I often sang from ‘Jis Desh Mein Ganga Behti Hain’ on the cricket field, or ‘Yeh Mera Deewanapan Hai’, or anything that came to my mind.”

Chandra told Kumble, “Coaches will tell you, flight the ball more, turn more, bowl more slowly, because they cannot understand you. Have the strength to ignore such advice”

There is a famous story of Chandra once beating Sunil Gavaskar in a match with a legbreak, and following on through to the batsman. Not to sledge him but to ask, “Suna kya?” (Did you hear that?), as a Mukesh song wafted to the pitch from a spectator’s transistor. Indians of an earlier generation took transistor radios to first-class matches – and listened to the running commentary. Often they tuned in to popular stations playing Bollywood songs. The volume was turned up when a Mukesh song came on during a match involving Chandra, or a song involving Sharmila Tagore when her husband, Tiger Pataudi, was in action. When players acknowledged the tribute, the crowd roared. It was a way of connecting with the stars in the pre-television and pre-selfie days. Chandra’s passion for Mukesh’s music converted many of his friends. Kirmani, Gundappa Viswanath, and even some journalists. You didn’t have to be a Mukesh fan to be in Chandra’s inner circle, but it certainly helped. Gavaskar has written about how he sometimes hummed a Mukesh tune on the field to inspire Chandra. Gavaskar had also told me about Chandra’s backlift as a batsman. “He might have scored all those zeroes,” he said, “but watch his backlift. The bat always came down straight.” I ask Chandra about this; he laughs. “This is true. Sunny and I got into this discussion during some games in the US. Usually I never stayed at the crease long enough for anybody to notice my backlift.” I joined in the laughter this time, knowing he had more wickets than runs in Tests, 242 to 167. “Hey, I nearly hit a six at Edgbaston,” he suddenly recalls. This was in the course of his highest score, 22, in the only Test featuring all four spinners of the great quartet – Bedi, Erapalli Prasanna, Srinivas Venkatraghavan and Chandra. No bowler, not even Chandra, wants to be seen as a poor batsman. After all, he played as an opener in school, kept wicket, and later bowled medium pace too.

Perhaps the weak right hand helped this one aspect, the backlift, of Chandra’s cricket more than any other. Perhaps this is just another one of those convenient theories. “I have heard all kinds of theories about my hand,” says Chandra, “That I have no bones, that my wrist can turn around 360 degrees, and so on.” Chandra always wore his sleeves buttoned down on and off the field; his right hand was so weak that he often had to support it with his left when he wasn’t bowling. He threw with his left hand, and as an adolescent, contemplated becoming a left-arm spinner. “I could not have bowled left-arm spin because my non-bowling arm would have been of no help,” he says. Once, many years ago, I stayed over at Chandra’s house after a late-night outing. We were both bachelors for the evening, as Chandra’s wife was out of town. I saw him without a shirt on. Let alone bowling legbreaks and googlies and topspinners. It is amazing that he can actually hold a ball in his right hand, or a pen even, so emaciated does it look. It took extraordinary courage to step onto a sports field – he had the attack of polio that left his arm withered when he was five or six. In his teens, he went from club cricket to first-class cricket to Test cricket in the space of six months. He was 18, and had to evaluate what worked best for him. Success came from self-awareness. Soon after Chandra’s Test debut, Pataudi told him that he would be India’s main strike bowler. Chandra smiles at the memory of a team led by a player with one eye, and a lead bowler with one arm. Yet nobody noticed these drawbacks or were even conscious of them when these two high-class performers were in action.

After he saw Chandra in action, Yagnanarayan invited him to join City Cricketers. It didn’t happen immediately because, says Chandra, “I found the joining fee of two rupees too high”

Chandra was lucky to have captains who understood him both as player and person. He describes it evocatively: “You know the four stages of the butterfly? It was like that with me. At the egg stage, I had my parents and Yagnanarayan, who led me to my club, City Cricketers; at the larva stage, there was V Subramanyam, captain of Karnataka. Then came the pupa stage where ML Jaisimha led my South Zone team, and finally as an adult, I had the fortune of playing under Tiger Pataudi.” Chandra as a butterfly is an apt image; delicate, gentle, inspiring. He was probably the only player who nursed no ambitions of leading India. “I did lead Karnataka once or twice,” he recalls, “to this day some of my team-mates remind me of how I finished an over, then went and stood at third man as usual, till someone reminded me I was captain and needed to decide who would bowl from the other end!” I always thought Chandra would have made a good coach. Time spent in his company talking cricket is always rewarding, and I have usually found his insights on players spot on. “X will play for India,” I would say watching a young player in action, and he would come back with why that might not happen, and events would prove him right. “Coaching is a different game today,” he says. Yet it was Chandra who gave Anil Kumble, India’s most successful bowler, the advice that made the difference. “I asked him to lengthen his run-up.” More importantly, he told Kumble, “Coaches will tell you, as they told me, flight the ball more, turn more, bowl more slowly, and a whole lot of things, because they cannot understand you. Have the strength to ignore such advice.” “You know,” he says, “I held the ball like a medium-pacer, on the smooth side along the seam, not across it like spinners. It felt natural, and may have accounted for the bounce off the wicket.” No coach would have allowed a spinner to grip the ball like that. Luckily no coach tried to force Chandra to change anything

Yagnanarayan, a patron of cricket in Bangalore, sometimes gathered a team to play local tournaments. After he saw Chandra in action, he invited him to join City Cricketers. It didn’t happen immediately because, says Chandra, “I found the joining fee of two rupees too high.” Chandra was a mystery both on and off the field. “I needed just two fielders,” he says, “a slip and a short leg. If I was bowling well, I didn’t need anybody else. If I was bowling badly, 22 fielders would not be enough.” It has never been easy for Chandra. India played 84 Tests in the 15 years that his career lasted, but Chandra played in only 58 of them. One-time chairman of selectors Vijay Merchant thought he was “a freak” and didn’t pick him for India’s first triumphant tour of West Indies in 1971. His selection for the England tour that followed was “a risk” in Merchant’s words. Yet it was his 6 for 38 at the Oval that won the Test and series for India, a first. Seven years later, his 12 for 104 (6 for 52 in each innings) in Melbourne led to India’s first Test win in Australia. What excites him today about the Oval Test? “I bowled a faster one to John Edrich and hit his stumps,” he recalls. “The newspapers got it wrong calling that a googly.” In fact, it was the famous “Mill Reef” ball. Mill Reef was a champion horse in England, tracked by Chandra and Dilip Sardesai. It was Sardesai who named Chandra’s faster delivery Mill Reef. Chandra tells the story of how he had planned to bowl a googly to Edrich when Sardesai came up to him and said, “Mill Reef dalo” (Bowl a Mill Reef). “I changed my mind and bowled the faster one. Edrich could not bring his bat down in time. In my mind’s eye I saw the stump cartwheeling and reaching the pavilion ahead of Edrich, but of course that cannot have happened!” For such a successful international bowler, Chandra had to live down the impression of being someone who “didn’t know what he bowled”. Even today, short biographies of the man insist that he was a great bowler because of this: if the bowler didn’t know what he was bowling, how would the batsman know? I think the canard originated with the great Australian bowler (and a prototype of Chandra) Bill O’Reilly, who first said something like it. It was cute, romantic, Cardusian. And like some of Cardus’ comments, it was fanciful. It is unfair, and makes no sense either. You don’t pick up over 200 Test wickets without knowing what you are doing.

Chandra was a mystery both on and off the field. “I needed just two fielders,” he says, “a slip and a short leg. If I was bowling well, I didn’t need anybody else”

My first boss, Rajan Bala, would wish all kinds of curses upon the head of anyone who thought Chandra didn’t know what he was bowling. The bowler himself alternated between amusement and irritation in the days when the three of us would spend an evening going yo-ho-ho with a bottle of rum. Chandra’s wife returns to the room. “Stay for lunch,” she says, and Chandra nods in agreement. But I am meeting someone for lunch – the same friend who had cut out a portion of the bed sheet Chandra had sat on all those years ago. “That’s not all,” my friend tells his wife when I tell her the Chandra story. “I didn’t wash my hands for days after shaking hands with Chandra.” In Chandra’s final Test, Kapil Dev claimed his first five-wicket haul. There is a neat symmetry about the passing of the baton from one strike bowler to the next. “We must meet more often,” Chandra says, as he sees me to the door, and then to the car. “You don’t need to,” I tell him about his accompanying me out, but he only smiles. Some passers-by walk on, then stop abruptly to turn back and look. There is a sign of recognition on their faces, but they don’t rush to take selfies, merely allow the great man to walk back slowly into his home of half a century.

Suresh Menon is the editor of the Wisden India Almanack – Article courtesy – ESPN Sports Media Ltd.

The Sri Lankan selectors today dropped batsman Kusal Mendis from their 15-member squad while Angelo Mathews returned to lead the side in the upcoming tour of India.

Right-handed opener Kaushal Silva was also omitted from the team that emerged victorious against Pakistan in the recent Test series held in the UAE.

Mathews was ruled out of the Test series against Pakistan due to a calf muscle injury.

Since making his Test debut in 2015, the 22-year-old Mendis was being seen as the best batting prospect for Sri Lanka after the retirement of Kumar Sangakkara and Mahela Jayawardene.

Mendis will miss out on a Test match after 22 consecutive appearances since his debut.

Former skipper Angelo Mathews returns to the side which features middle-order batsman Roshen Silva as the only uncapped player.

Sri Lanka are slated to play three Tests, three ODIs and as many T20 Internationals in India.

The squad will leave for India on Wednesday.

Squad: Dinesh Chandimal (captain), Dimuth Karunaratne, Dhananjaya de Silva, Sadeera Samarawickrema, Angelo Mathews, Lahiru Thirimnne, Rangana Herath, Suranga Lakmal, Dilruwan Perera, Lahiru Gamage, Lakshan Sandakan, Vishwa Fernanado, Dasun Shanaka, Niroshan Dickwella and Roshen Silva.

The big two are, but otherwise the model, heavily dependent on international stars and an Indian audience, is threatening to collapse under its own bloated weight

“All of us are unashamed T20 mercenaries, now.” – Brendon McCullum The date: June 19, a day after the Champions Trophy final.

The setting: a swanky London hotel. The occasion: the launch of South Africa’s new Twenty20 competition.

Yes, yet another T20 league. South Africa’s professed to be different by being a “global” league – although exactly what this means, no one is quite sure. The four overseas cricketers permitted in each XI would feature, like McCullum, the same players recycled from other leagues around the world. Many would represent teams with the same nicknames as others throughout the world, even owned by exactly the same people. Four months later, the first season of the Global T20 League (GLT20) was cancelled. The league failed to secure a stable broadcasting deal and sponsorship; the problems had already cost Haroon Lorgat, Cricket South Africa’s (CSA) chief executive who devised the tournament, his job. “According to informed observers, the debacle could end up costing CSA somewhere in the region of $10 million. The fiasco shattered the myth that T20 tournaments guarantee profit. The significant majority of T20 domestic teams throughout the world are still loss-making enterprises. The GLT20 had been slated to begin on November 3, the day after the start of the Bangladesh Premier League (BPL). The clash shows how these leagues are not merely in competition with international cricket; they are also increasingly in competition with each other, for viewers’ eyeballs and broadcasters’ cash. This year, only June and October lack major T20 competitions. As the calendar becomes more crowded, clashes will become harder to manage: the Big Bash League (BBL) in Australia is expanding this year; the Indian Premier League (IPL) could well gain more teams and games in the coming years; and, from 2020, England will have a second T20 competition, co-existing with the T20 Blast.

The IPL, with its combination of the nation’s love for cricket, first-mover advantage and India’s huge economic heft, has long proved itself to be commercially viable, even though many teams did not consistently generate annual profits before the new broadcasting deal

In September, broadcasting and digital rights for the next five years of the IPL were sold for $2.55 billion, making it one of the world’s most lucrative sports league per match. The remarkable contract, an annual increase of over 2.5 times on the previous IPL deal, added to the perception that, in a volatile world, owning a T20 league or team is as secure an investment as owning gold. That sense is backed up by players like McCullum who can now earn considerably more on the T20 circuit than playing for their national teams. Yet, the IPL aside, very few T20 teams or leagues are generating a profit. Even the BBL, widely acclaimed as the best-run T20 league, made a A$33 million loss over its first five years. So the impression of a T20 franchise team as a licence to print money jars with the reality. The existence of so many leagues – at least seven around the world can justifiably claim to attract international stars – is “absolutely a bubble”, according to one of the most senior figures in cricket broadcasting. “Someone has to pull back and say what does this ecosystem look like, and what it will look like five years from now, and what are the steps that we need to take to ensure that it doesn’t turn into a complete madhouse?” Whatever the future of T20 leagues, it will not look like the present. **** To understand the fragmented T20 ecosystem today, consider how we got here. Since the T20 Blast launched in 2003, leagues have popped up on the whims of national administrators, opportunistically slotted in whenever there is a brief gap in the calendar. Without broad agreement among administrators worldwide about what the calendar – both for T20 and across all forms – should look like, there has been a mad scramble, not unlike the Wild West of 19th-century USA. “It’s a bit of a land grab from these leagues,” says Pete Russell, the Caribbean Premier League’s (CPL) chief operating officer. “Everyone is trying to set them up and run them at 100 miles an hour.” The IPL, with its combination of the nation’s love for cricket, first-mover advantage and India’s huge economic heft, has long proved itself to be commercially viable, even though many teams did not consistently generate annual profits before the new broadcasting deal. And in Australia, the BBL’s popularity – it has regularly attracted TV audiences of 1 million a night, 4% of the population – means that its new broadcasting deal, which begins in 2018-19, seems certain to push the league into a healthy profit.

© ESPNcricinfo Ltd Elsewhere the picture is less certain. In South Africa’s new league, an investor pulled out of a franchise before the league was supposed to start, sceptical about the competition’s claims that teams would become profit-making from the third season. The CPL has lost money in each of its five years; Russell still considers it a few years away from turning a profit. The BPL makes a modest profit for the Bangladesh board, but the actual teams lose $1-1.5 million a year. Similarly, the Pakistan Super League (PSL) makes about $2.5 million a year for the Pakistan board, but the six teams lose at least $1 million a year each. All these leagues have a very clear problem – one even greater than the unfathomable worldwide schedule. “Most sporting events raise the vast majority of their revenue from their home TV market,” explains Paul Smith, a sports media expert from De Montfort University. This bodes ill for leagues in nations that are poor, small or both. And it suggests that, while leagues are focused on growing in India – “it’s something you should factor in when developing your league,” Lorgat said before leaving CSA – the country’s appetite for watching foreign T20 leagues is limited. Even football’s English Premier League, the world’s most successful league beyond its borders, only raises one-third of its total broadcasting rights from outside the UK. The same has proved true among T20 cricket leagues: the CPL, a league with a small domestic economy, raises only 35% of its broadcasting and commercial income from beyond the Caribbean. And so the fear is that the abundance of T20 leagues today isn’t borne of fans’ demand for T20. It is also borne of unjustified optimism about the global appetite for T20. After five years, successful competitions should be in profit, believes Simon Chadwick, a sports business expert. “In situations where this does not happen, investors and other stakeholders are entitled to question whether an organisation is being appropriately managed and led, when profit may ultimately be achieved, if an organisation should retrench from its existing position, and perhaps even look towards withdrawal or termination.” **** Given its uniquely favourable circumstances, the wider lessons from the IPL’s success are limited. Altogether more relevant is the BBL’s development.

“We treat our county matches as internationals matches, both in terms of the way we sell them and deliver the operation on a match day. A good customer experience is very important”  RICHARD GOULD, SURREY CHIEF EXECUTIVE

“The overall objective of the BBL was to appeal to non-traditional cricket audience,” recalls Anthony Everard, the league’s head. It sent “a very strong message: this is not cricket as you’ve known it in the past”. What has happened since points to how T20 leagues can grow interest in the sport, and hence the overall demand for watching cricket – and ultimately its commercial worth. The BBL’s success in growing an audience has been underpinned by its long-term planning. In its first broadcasting contract, it emphatically prioritised visibility and exposure – ensuring that every game was on free-to-air – over the short-term revenue maximising that would have come from a pay TV deal. “We don’t see it as a loss so much as an investment,” Everard says. “It’s no surprise any start-up will go through an investment phase, then you move into profitability.” The league’s ownership structure has reinforced this big-picture outlook. After flirting with private investment, the BBL instead opted to own the entire competition – everything from the league itself to the teams. Such a structure has given the league stability and the ability to absorb financial losses. Other leagues have followed the IPL’s model of private ownership. And while there can be benefits – owners’ entrepreneurialism, importing lessons from other sports, and developing brands in teams in different countries – the result is that leagues, and teams, are less patient about getting a return on their initial investment. In the stillborn GLT20, teams playing at tier one grounds agreed to pay CSA $5 million a year (those at tier two grounds agreed to pay $3 million) before their operational expenses and salaries, which together approach another $2 million a year. Such outlays encourage short-termism. “The business fundamentals of leagues are flawed because the operating expenses are so high,” believes the senior broadcasting source. “Everyone loses money so there’s no incentive to stay in the game.” So it proved in South Africa. The obvious way to make bankrolling teams cheaper is to lower costs. But this would reduce player salaries, making it harder to attract the stars that they need to attract interest in the league abroad. There is no easy way out of the quandary. Yet some clubs have found innovative ways to generate more revenue, which could provide a template for other teams. The BBL has been underpinned by vibrant local rivalries, with both Melbourne and Sydney teams playing each other twice a season. The league deliberately gave “every opportunity for rivalries to flourish,” Everard explains. “You can’t manufacture it. Fans are smart enough to know when something is authentic, or when it’s manufactured.”

Knight Riders Inc: outlets in Kolkata, Trinidad and coming soon to Cape Town Knight Riders Inc: outlets in Kolkata, Trinidad and coming soon to Cape Town © AFP/Getty Images Surrey provides an instructive case study in how T20 teams can develop brands. In a country where the T20 competition has been a source of ceaseless debate, Surrey have been uniquely successful in attracting home crowds. Over eight home games, Surrey’s total gate receipts more than doubled, to £2.1 million between 2013 and 2017, success that cannot be explained away merely by the advantages of being in London. “We started working on delivering one sell-out match – Surrey versus Middlesex – five years ago,” explains chief executive Richard Gould. “Once that became a regular sell-out game the demand and excitement has grown to other games. “We treat our county matches as internationals matches, both in terms of the way we sell them and deliver the operation on a match day. A good customer experience is very important.” The club has tailored its schedule, focusing on night games from Wednesday to Friday, which are best suited to the local market – especially post-work revellers – while developing bespoke corporate packages to generate extra cash. Similar traits can be seen in the BBL, especially its invented traditions – the New Year’s Eve game in Adelaide, New Year’s Day match in Perth and Melbourne derbies on the first two Saturdays in January. The Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) have adopted a more pioneering approach – perhaps a glimpse of T20’s future. The Rajasthan Royals were the first IPL team to attempt to become an international brand, acquiring a stake in teams in foreign leagues and changing their nicknames to Royals. But so far no side has adopted the approach as rigorously as KKR, who have bought teams in the Caribbean – the Trinbago Knight Riders (TKR), the 2017 CPL champions – and South Africa – the Cape Town Knight Riders. “The question always was how do you keep your brand alive for the rest of the year, how do you grow your business and increase your revenues, grow your fan base and grow your brand?” says Venky Mysore, KKR’s chief executive. “What we landed on was to figure out a way to potentially own multiple franchises – or assets, as we call them – and in an ideal world we said that if we have three or four or five assets then it becomes a year-round activity.” The idea has several strands. One, to develop synergies in coaching and support staff – Simon Katich works across all three franchises, Jacques Kallis is head coach in India and South Africa, and the analyst and other staff work for all three teams – to develop competitive advantages on the field. Two, to collaborate between franchises off the field and share best practice in everything, from finance to contracts, marketing, digital content and merchandising. Sharing staff is, as Mysore explains, also financially efficient. And finally, to keep fans and sponsors engaged throughout the year.

So, alongside a booming IPL, a portrait of the future might be cross-nation leagues – an Asian league; teams from New Zealand, and perhaps even the Far East, in the BBL; and the CPL becoming an Americas League, gaining teams in Canada and the US.

“The two pillars on which you build a sports franchise are your brand and fan base,” says Mysore. Owning franchises outside India means “we are able to provide a lot more value for brand and opportunities for them to activate throughout the year as opposed to going to sleep for nine months a year before the next season happens.” Even so, getting KKR fans to follow Knight Riders teams in other leagues has proved challenging. Most of TKR’s matches in 2017 took place at 9pm local time – thereby best suited to the Indian market watching in the morning – yet Indian viewing figures remained significantly less than those for state Indian T20 leagues, like the Tamil Nadu Premier League. For KKR’s venture to move to the next stage – to become a tool for generating more revenue, rather than merely reducing costs – on-field synergies must increase. This year, Sunil Narine excelled for KKR in the IPL and then for TKR in the CPL, but rather than join Cape Town Knight Riders in South Africa, he signed for Dhaka Dynamites in the BPL instead. If the Knight Riders had, say, four players representing all three teams, it would be easier for them to develop a coherent identity. In the future, as already happens for coaches, players might sign contracts to represent a franchise across multiple leagues. Most importantly, some of those players should be Indian, giving Indian fans more reason to watch; instead, Indian players remain barred from overseas T20 leagues. Perhaps there are broader lessons about commercial viability from other sports. The socialist traits of US sports leagues – the draft system, and equitable sharing of revenue between teams, both of which are designed to ensure competitive balance and unpredictability – has influenced how T20 leagues are structured. Both the BBL and PSL have studied Major League Soccer in the USA, and how it established itself in a saturated sports market. To Everard, there are two transferable lessons: “Don’t try and be something that you’re not – they tried to Americanise soccer,” and to focus on playing games in suitably sized stadiums. Major League Soccer previously had terrible experiences playing in barren NFL stadiums. Sales of merchandise and licensing (allowing companies to use KKR’s name on their products) remain small – only about $1 million a year for KKR, under 5% of total revenue – although Mysore believes these can eventually be worth one third of KKR’s total revenue. The world over, franchises are experimenting endlessly in their attempts to raise more cash. Teams are gathering data on fans to sell to sponsors. Leagues are innovating in their use of digital media – the CPL started live-streaming games over Facebook this season – to engage new fans, and focusing on delivering bite-sized videos on social media. One hope is that the growth of satellite and live streaming through on-demand websites will increase competition for rights and drive up prices, just as happened with the IPL, when Facebook bid $610 million for the rights to stream five years of games.

Surrey fans pick up free merchandise outside the Oval during a T20 Blast game Surrey fans pick up free merchandise outside the Oval during a T20 Blast game © Getty Images Shoaib Naveed, the chief operating officer of the PSL’s Islamabad United, explains that trying to make a profit is “a learning curve. But slowly we are also starting to develop annual calendars carrying out activities – talent hunts, tournaments, matches – in the off season to keep consumer interest alive.” It will, he predicts, “take a few years for that to properly develop and gain a foothold in the sponsors’ mind.” **** Does making money actually matter? In 2017, even to broach the question seems sacrilegious. And yet, Premier League football owners routinely lost cash for most of the league’s history, with owners treating their teams as if playing a sports management computer game rather than running an actual business. There are psychic rewards – benefits that can’t be measured financially – to owning a sport team: associating with superstars, free publicity and public goodwill. Almost everyone who buys a team is passionate about sport, diluting their interest in making money from the side they own. Owning a sports team is also a symbol of wealth and brings visibility; George W Bush invested in Texas Rangers to increase his public profile and credibility before running to become US president. In Bangladesh, rich industrialists bankroll teams. They view running a franchise as “part of our CSR [corporate social responsibility],” explains Obeid Nizam, the chief executive of Dhaka Dynamites. Yet even there, owners are not content to suffer financial losses indefinitely. “The current BPL model is not a money-making model. We’re working on it and discussing with the BPL,” Nizam says. “We’ve written to them a number of times. They said they would sit down and think about it, but nothing happened.” He hopes that the BPL will consider a form of revenue sharing – like passing some of the league’s central sponsorship onto the franchises themselves – to militate teams’ financial losses. The world over, sports owners are increasingly demanding a return on their investment, in the way that has long been the case in US sports. Even in football’s Premier League, owners are learning how to make cash. While many football owners (like Jack Walker, a local steel magnate who led Blackburn Rovers to their only league title in 1995) once made a loss because of their support for the club, T20 leagues have been around for such a short period that there are no lifelong fans among today’s owners. They are naturally more driven by commercial imperatives, especially in nations where cricket is not the dominant sport and the reflected glory of owning teams is less.

As the chief executive of Brimstone Investment Corporation Limited said when the company withdrew from running the new Stellenbosch franchise in South Africa: “This venture had to undergo the same process and be tested against our standard investment criteria as all other investment proposals.” That it failed to do so was not merely a red flag for South Africa’s competition, but for leagues the world over. **** The global T20 calendar is only going to become more disjointed. Existing competitions are expanding – the CPL might extend by a week next year, and has designs on adding teams from Canada and the USA; Everard predicts that after its expansion this coming season, the BBL in five years’ time “will certainly have more games and I think it would be reasonable to assume that we will have more teams as well.” New leagues are launching. Minor ones, like Afghanistan’s T20 league (Shpageeza Cricket League), are making a renewed push for global attention. If the World T20 reverts to being every two years, as expected from 2020, that will further compress the space for leagues. And the IPL’s sheer economic might, with the BBL and perhaps the new English competition formidable too, could also undermine less lucrative leagues, because the extra money players could earn might seem insignificant set against the financial risk of being injured and missing the bigger leagues. It all adds up to the sense of a centre that cannot hold. “Personally as a cricket watcher and supporter of the game, I don’t think there is enough space for so many leagues,” says Naveed. “The ICC and governing boards, along with the various stakeholders, will have to come up with a more regulated and systematic structure that makes commercial T20 leagues more viable in the long run so that there is a balance between domestic T20s and international cricket.” More collaboration between T20 leagues is inevitable. The PSL has already been in communication with leagues in the Caribbean and Bangladesh about potential champion v champion matches. One solution is an old one: the Champions League, which was scrapped after its sixth edition in 2014. The competition was “ahead of its time,” says Everard. Franchises believe that the tournament could help them generate more cash and so make their T20 leagues more viable.

For most overseas leagues, it doesn’t make sense to bank on an Indian audience without having Indian stars for them to support For most overseas leagues, it doesn’t make sense to bank on an Indian audience without having Indian stars for them to support  notably the players eligible to represent multiple teams – there is broad support, including from KKR, for the tournament’s return. As the number of prestigious competitors has burgeoned, so the concept of a Champions League has become more relevant. But the league would need to acquire sporting equity it never possessed before, when it was jarringly skewed in favour of Indian representatives. Its nadir came in 2011, when, after injuries to Indian players, Mumbai Indians were allowed to field a fifth overseas player “to ensure the integrity of the tournament”. Yet even if the Champions League were revived, there remains a sense that the coming years will witness a reckoning for T20 competitions. “Market forces will determine how these leagues end up – which ones are successful and which ones are not. But I’m not convinced there is a market for all eight leagues or however many there are,” Russell says. And so after a certain point the tussle between T20 leagues threatens to become a zero-sum game – for one to grow, another will need to weaken. The supply of elite cricketers, and amount that fans will watch, is limited. Most importantly, for broadcasters, “the cash is finite,” according to the broadcasting official. “It’s not possible for the pool to just keep expanding.” Russell envisages “a culling of the leagues and further discussion of how do we all work this out together?” He believes they are also played over too many months of the year. “I don’t think anyone wants to see these T20 leagues going on all year. I just don’t think that’s sustainable. At the moment there’s no stopping the juggernaut.” Perhaps the most likely outcome is for a rationalisation – with the biggest leagues expanding, and others merging, across nations. Cross-nation leagues are common in other sports – rugby union now has South African domestic teams playing in European domestic competition – and might soon do so in T20 too. So, alongside a booming IPL, a portrait of the future might be cross-nation leagues – an Asian league, with teams from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan; teams from New Zealand, and perhaps even the Far East, in the BBL; and the CPL becoming an Americas League, gaining teams in Canada and the US. Leagues will also increasingly play games beyond their borders: the CPL, which already plays in Florida, is considering playing in Singapore and the UAE. The upshot could be a sanitised schedule. There would be fewer high-profile leagues, but these would grow in number of teams, fixtures and prestige. With fewer leagues, and a rationalised international calendar, scheduling clashes could be mitigated, ensuring that the best players were available more often. The availability of stars matters: one of the biggest determinants of overseas viewing for the CPL is whether Chris Gayle is batting. Eventually, the helter-skelter of T20 will give way to some sense of order and normalcy, and a schedule that becomes easier to comprehend. “I see it as the evolution of the sport,” Everard says. “Over a period of time things will settle down and a natural order will emerge. Ultimately it will come down to what the fan preference is.” The process of getting there will be Darwinian. For some leagues to surge to new heights, others may have to flounder – or cease to exist altogether.

By Tim Wigmore is a freelance journalist and author of Second XI: Article Courtesy – espncricinfo.com